His Story - A Novel Memoir - The Life and Times of Dick O'Toole

By Nigel Gray

Dick O’Toole is a rogue floundering on the assault course of life. His attempts at making the world a better place and his ‘doggedness’ in defending the underdog invariably lead to anguish and failure, but our protagonist comes up smelling of roses. Readers are advised to fasten their seat belts: they’re in for a wild ride.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: May 23, 2013
• ISBN: 9780987356581

Nigel Gray

I was born in a farm shed in Ireland to two teenagers, neither of whom had known their parents, and in my father's case who didn't even know his name. My mother was a kitchen maid, my father a farm servant. They had three unwanted babies in three years. At twelve months old, during the Second World War, I was taken to England. I never saw my father again. Nor the brother and sister. I went into a series of foster homes, a children's home, and later to live with my mother. They were not the best of times. I left school only semi-literate, and became involved in petty criminality. I set out to work my way slowly overland to Australia (a historically appropriate destination for an Irish criminal). I spent two years travelling and working in ten European countries and was then arrested by a beautiful Greek/Irish teenage girl and an unplanned pregnancy. I became an anarchist, was involved in numerous political causes, was arrested many times, locked up on a number of occasions, and deported for political offences from four countries. I read my first novel (Steinbeck's magnificent The Grapes of Wrath), when I was in my twenties and became an instant convert. I was an unskilled manual worker for eleven years, was awarded a BA in English and Politics, and an MA in Creative Writing from British universities. I went to South East Asia as part of a non-violent action group in 1967 to oppose the American War, was involved in civil unrest in several countries in 1968 ('the year of revolutions'), worked for the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Campaign in 1972, and visited South Africa to oppose apartheid, as well as some of the Soviet Bloc countries. I began writing when I was in prison in Thailand. At first I wrote performance poetry, and went on to write non-fiction, and then stories, novels, plays, and children's books. Along the way I had six children (or four, depending on how you look at it), each with a different mother, set up a commune in Cumbria, did work for People Not Psychiatry, established a major Arts Festival. I have been writing professionally for thirty years, and have had more than seventy books published. I have had work published in twenty-six countries and twenty-four languages, and have won various awards and honours. My wonderful wife comes from Sudan in East Africa. We were married in 1977, and have one son. I arrived in Western Australia in 1988 (more than twenty years later than I'd intended), having migrated with my wife and two of my children under the special category of artists and sports people of international reputation, and we have been Australian citizens since 1990. I am a member and a past president of my branch of PEN, the writers' organization with special concern for writers throughout the world who are in imprisoned or persecuted. With the respected literary critic and poet Dr David Craig, I founded and edited the literary magazine Fireweed, which was published quarterly from 1974 to 1978. As a photographer I had work published and exhibited. North West Arts mounted a one-person exhibition of my photographs in 1977. As an actor I created the role of Joe Malik in Ken Campbell's epic production of Illuminatus which opened in a warehouse Liverpool in 1976 and then moved to The Micky Theatre, Amsterdam, and the National Theatre, London in 1977. I have taught Literature courses for: The University of Liverpool; The University of Lancaster; The Worker's Education Association. I have taught Creative Writing courses for: The University of Liverpool; The University of Leicester; The University of Western Australia; The Worker's Education Association; The Arvon Foundation; The Katherine Susannah Pritchard Foundation; The Northampton Arts Centre. I have taught numerous writing workshops in schools, colleges, universities, libraries, arts centres, writer's centres, centres for the unemployed, and prisons. I have held the following writing fellowships: In the UK: East Midlands Arts 1977/79; Northampton Development Corporation 1979/80; C Day Lewis Fellowship, London 1980/81; Eastern Arts 1981/82; In Sudan: Khartoum International Community School 2009. In Australia: WA College of Advanced Education 1988; Shire of Kalamunda 1989/1990; Edith Cowan University 1990 and 1994; Katharine Susannah Prichard Foundation 1992. As well as The Dickens Fellowship Award, and The Irish Post Award for Literature, my books have won four major international awards, been shortlisted for thirteen more, and have picked up sixteen further honours in Australia, Europe and the United States. I have a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Western Australia; an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia, UK; and a BA in English and Politics from the University of Lancaster, UK.

Book preview

Sterne

James Joyce, after a life punctuated by misadventures, finally came to a full stop. (And not before time, some bemused readers might say). No worries: in Ireland another author was born. He was born during a global year of mass murder and mayhem. (Who wasn’t?)

Like a vagrant in a derelict house during a blizzard, he was reluctant to debouch. But they came, the faceless ones, like pigs to a squat. He didn’t give up without a struggle, but they evicted him in the end. (They always do.) In later years, because of the bumpy nature of his skull and the inadequacies of the left side of his brain, he assumed that they had hauled him out with a pair of fire tongs.

And whose grand entrance was this?

Have patience. We shall see.

A simultaneous birth was of greater moment. Eleven thousand kilometres away, in that same northern spring, Ho Chi Minh delivered a baby he himself had conceived some time before. The baby’s name was Vietnam Doc Lap Dong Minh, known familiarly as Viet Minh. It would be a while yet before Viet Minh could crawl or feed himself, never mind walk or run or help others. But who was the godfather who watched over Viet Minh? Who was it that gave him a helping hand? Who told him in his early years, ‘If that Jap keeps bullying you, go straight back out there and beat the shit out of him.’ (‘But he’s too big,’ said Viet Minh. ‘Too strong.’ ‘Well then,’ came the reply, ‘Get out there, kick his butt, and run.’) What was this kindly uncle’s name? Why, sure, it was good old Uncle Sam.

‘Never!’ I hear you cry. ‘But I thought it was Uncle Sam who…’

You’re right. It was the very same unspeakable Uncle Sam. But that was later.

Sometimes history repeats itself, it’s true. More often, it contradicts itself from one moment to the next.

But let us return to the question of whose tiny feet popped into James Joyce’s enormous boots.

They were mine (– this is a sort of memoir, after all).

Or rather, they were his. For when I think back to my earlier years, the person I glimpse does not seem to be me, but to be some other that I once intimately knew. So let’s give him a name. Let’s call him ‘Dick’. Why not? And let’s call him ‘O’Toole’.

I have to say, too, that looking back is like poring over an ancient diary wherein the ink of most pages is faded completely away, but here and there passages are faintly legible, and for some reason there are fragments or even whole paragraphs where the print seems as clear as it was on the day the entry was made. Whether this record is fact or fiction or a mixture of the two, I cannot say. What can I do but trust the author? He was there.

Furthermore, it seems to me that individuals do not exist in a void, but are of their place and time, tiny cogs in the complex wheels of their world. I don’t mean to suggest that Dick O’Toole, in the first year of his life, was aware of the Warsaw Ghetto, and the concentration camps, and the evils of colonial oppression. I can’t even say when or how he became aware of these things. But without doubt, they gradually permeated his consciousness, his imagination, his concerns, his dreams and nightmares, his Weltanschauung. He cannot be divorced from them, any more than a flounder can be divorced from the ocean floor.

But let’s abandon him and leave him to flounder (his parents did), and turn our attention elsewhere. On the wind you could hear and smell the madness of armies at work.

Where had all the flowers gone?

When will they ever learn?

Hitler bit off more than he could chew by sinking his gnashers into the rump of the Big Bear. Even for the victor, the corpses were beyond counting, the suffering was beyond imagining, and the winter was beyond enduring.

Another Adolph travelled to Minsk to witness the murder of Jews. He went on to Lvov where he arrived late and missed most of the entertainment: the execution ditch had already been covered with dirt. But he was in time to enjoy the spectacle of the final act: blood was gushing out of the ground (‘like a geyser,’ he said) due to pressure from the bodily gasses of the deceased.

Picture that!

In Warsaw, the Nazis built a wall around the Jewish ghetto. The daily ration for those inside was one hundred and eighty-nine calories (or two slices of bread): a slimmer’s paradise. ‘We will assume most will die of starvation,’ said the officer in charge. Only eighty thousand obliged. The disappointed Nazis, at their wit’s end, were forced to come up with a more imaginative solution.

Yes, and the Nazis built autobahns, and made the trains run on time, and they provided free transport for Jews and other minorities – which just goes to show that no one is all bad.

But back to the ghetto (before it was blasted).

Survivors hide where they can.

There are nine in the attic – ten if you count the baby. The infant’s cries cannot be stifled. The father’s eyes, already as big as begging bowls in his shrunken face, stare helplessly as the baby is wrested from his arms, and a coat is wrapped tightly around the little head.

By the time they hear the Schutzstaffel leave, the child is dead.

At the same time, another infant died – this one in a French jail in Vietnam.

‘What was a baby doing in jail?’ you ask.

He was there as a guest, at the behest of the colonialists, at the wasted breast of his young mother who, under the watchful eye of a civilized gentleman from the Deuxième Bureau, had been tortured and hung up to dry by her thumbs and beaten like a dirty rug, and then taken down and left on the cell floor to expire. And another young woman, one who knew the victim well, was guillotined in Saigon. (Guillotining is a French invention for cutting people down to size.) And a seventy-year-old man was released from jail with his injuries as souvenirs, having been dragged through the dirt behind a car, locked in solitary confinement, and tortured. But there lived a man who had been a caring father to that infant, now deceased; a loving husband to that violated bride; an affectionate brother to that young woman who had lost her head while all around were keeping theirs; a dutiful son to that torn and humiliated sage. The French would come to wish that they had caught and killed him too.

Beaucoup des regrets.

Who was this man?

Vo Nguyen Giap.

‘When anyone who has comrades is murdered, the enemy has not yet won.’

Elsewhere in Asia, the Japanese devised a method of nursing the captured enemy wounded that was more economical than changing their dressings: they poured petrol over them and set them on fire.

Nice chaps, the Japs.

A year of births and deaths then. And amidst the dying, a rebirth. Ethiopia emerged as an independent nation once more – liberated from the five-year stranglehold of Mussolini’s fascist army of occupation, and the stench of mustard gas and racial segregation.

Wars spill blood. Oceans of the stuff are wasted. Leakage from humans can be fatal. To save lives, top-ups are required. Dr Charles Drew, in the United States of America, discovered that plasma could be stored in banks and used to save the lives of wounded people regardless of race or blood group. Charles became a project director for the American Red Cross. He soon resigned.

Why?

The United States War Department issued a directive that bodily fluid from Blacks should not be used to pollute the bodies of soldiers who were white.

Charles drew back.

Charles Drew was black.

Two members of the Czechoslovakian Air Force parachuted into Bohemia and shot and killed Reinhard Heydrich, renowned for his cruelty. Soon after midnight some days later, the mystified and terrified villagers of Lidice were rounded up. Eighty-five children were despatched to Chelmo in Poland where they were gassed to death. Two hundred and three women were sent to Ravensbruck, Lublin, or Auschwitz, where many died. All of the one hundred and ninety-two males over the age of fifteen were slaughtered. The butchering took five hours. The village was razed. The ground was ploughed up. The name ‘Lidice’ was erased from official records.

‘That’s not so bad,’ you tell me. ‘The Nazis did far worse than that.’

True.

Our hero was born during a war in which thirteen million one hundred thousand children were killed. Given that he was a product of a world of such insanity, an age of such barbarity, when the time comes, let us not judge his crimes too harshly.

What is more, it is now believed that the months spent in the womb have a significant effect on the person that the fetus will become. Dick’s fetal period had been unenviable. His carrier was akin to a hagfish – a primitive serpent from the muddy depths of cold oceans. A hagfish has no defences against attack other than to exude vast quantities of bitter slime from her vaginations. What fetal Dick was suffocated by was not, as he might have supposed, his embryonic sac, but the sheets of slime his reluctant host produced in the futile hope of protecting herself.

In the Bismarck Sea, floating Japs had no method of protecting themselves. US and Australian aircraft systematically searched the waters, strafing every Japanese survivor they could find, and turned lifeboats into bloody colanders. It was all right to be callous and inhuman to the Japanese because they were only Japanese. And besides, the Japanese were callous and inhuman.

Our infant hero hadn’t yet learned to be callous and inhuman. (Give him time.) But it was all right to be callous and inhuman toward him, because he was only a bastard.

Later he would be a bigger bastard – just wait and see!

While adversity turns most of us into brutes, there are those exceptional beings whose integrity and humanity is only strengthened in its forge. Uncle Ho had walked over the treacherous mountains into China (in the ironic disguise of a blind man) to seek help from the Allies for Viet Minh’s struggle against the Japanese.

He was promptly thrown in the nick.

So what did he do?

He educated his cellmates, he wrote poems, and he played chess.

‘Come the right moment,’ he said, ‘a pawn can bring victory.’

‘When the water rises,’ he said, ‘the fish eats the ant; when the water falls, the ant eats the fish.’

‘When the prison doors are opened,’ he said, ‘the dragon will fly out.’

Ho was born in 1892. 1892 was a year of the dragon. In 1943, a year of the sheep, when things progress slowly, Ho waited patiently in the cocoon of his cell for his wings to grow strong, and for the fire to kindle in his belly.

Dick had been born in a year of the snake. Accordingly, he should grow into someone wise and romantic. Also he would be among the world’s worst gamblers, so he ought to stay away from horse races, dice, and the stock exchange.

But what of his baby steps? His first tooth? His first word? Who knows? Not he. Not I. The introductory pages in the aforementioned diary are understandably as blank as cot sheets after the stains of shit and vomit have been washed out. For the most part, the succession of faceless foster parents left no imprint. Given that no one kept him for long we can only conclude that Dick was as lovable as a slug in a kitchen garden. I am not blaming the fosterers. I am sure that if I could have met him, he would have repelled me too.

But why not invent some carers (with interesting lives)? That is, after all, the sort of thing we authors do. I could use as models, for example, a couple who starred in an anecdote, supposedly true, that begins with a woman screaming for help in a locked New York apartment. When the cops break down the door to gain access they find the caterwauling female tied to a bed beside which a male person in a batman outfit lies bleeding and unconscious on the floor. The couple were wont to enjoy a sex game in which the Dark Knight (even on a bright day) leaped from the top of the wardrobe onto the restrained and helpless maiden and had his wicked will of her. This particular afternoon is hot and sultry (like the maiden (– in her dreams)) and so the fan is twirling and consequently has put out her lover’s lights. Neighbours say that they are a quiet, ordinary, and conservative couple, and that they go to church on Sundays.

Yes, and I, your author, once had neighbours like that. Very neighbourly they were, too. And I didn’t know until their divorce that the only way the wife could bring her husband to orgasm was by caning him on his bare buttocks. He subsequently married a policewoman, who no doubt knew how to give him a good time.

But no, tempted though I am, I will restrict myself to the few words that by and by become faintly legible in our little guidebook. Although Dick was never to become a minstrel, he was, unarguably, a thing of shreds and patches. Here’s where his memory begins.

Fragment 1: There are two dogs. One is black-and-white. A collie. The other is a mongrel, tan in colour and shorthaired. Oh, how Dick loves those dogs for the brief time that they come wagging their forgiving tails into his forlorn life. He loves them for their smell, their warmth, their wet noses and rough tongues, and their acceptance of even the lowest forms of life – such as himself.

Fragment 2: Dick is splay-legged on the bone-hard, spine-knobbed, rough-haired back of a swaying cow. The back is so broad that little Dick is practically doing the splits. He loves being up there, he loves the cow, but at the same time, bler-dob, bler-dob, bler-dob, he tips from side to side, and is afraid that he will fall.

‘Well,’ you say, ‘that doesn’t amount to much. Why are you bothering to tell us that?’

Because to Dick, it seems important. Even though he doesn’t know why. But wait. There is more.

Fragment 3: It is a morning glittering with ice. The foster man carries Dick outside into the brittle air. Snow lies deep, and undisturbed – except for the footprints of the fox. Yes, even in the extraordinary, harsh beauty of that hostile, silent, and empty world, there is evidence of a survivor, warm-blooded, resolute, and tough. Little Dick is enthralled.

Fragment 4: Sadly, the location changes. No farm, this. A modest, detached house. On the driveway sits a car covered by a tarpaulin. Not dead. Just comatose. Its wheels have been removed. It waits patiently for wartime petrol rationing to end.

These foster parents are Dutch, short and squat: a pair of compact, malevolent ogres. There is a box room in which the man mends clocks and watches. Even at four-years-old, Dick is amazed that those stubby fingers can do such delicate work. Dick experiences those hands very differently. All four hands that foster him in this saturnine house are heavy, hard, and hurtful. It is as if their owners frequently regard Dick as a steak in need of tenderising.

One day there is a visit from a person called a mummy. This raises Dick’s hopes. He might be sprung from this prison. The mummy might rescue him from this nightmare.

The mummy comes.

She brings two toy soldiers. They are made of lead. (Perhaps she was hoping to poison him. But no, that’s unfair. She probably had to forgo a meal to buy them.) Each of the soldiers, one standing, one prone, is firing a rifle. In the only game Dick would play with them they were continually at war. With the wisdom of hindsight this might be seen as prophetic.

The mummy goes.

Leaving him behind.

Dick runs into the parlour, hurls himself onto the window seat and bangs his fists on the pane. Ah, the pain. Once the gate has clicked closed, two pairs of heavy foster hands begin grabbing and slapping and dragging, and Dick is incarcerated in a familiar Cimmerian cell: the cupboard beneath the stairs.

You think that’s bad?

Elsewhere, Gypsies, socialists, trade unionists, homosexuals, Jews, Russians, Poles, the physically handicapped, and the mentally retarded, were being pigeonholed. They pecked each other without mercy, of course, like hens in a battery. Outside, bodies were stacked high against the walls of incinerators, like logs outside the kitchen ready for winter.

Above the gate is written, Arbeit Macht Frei. The doors of the cattle trucks are dragged open. There are fifty or more scarecrows in each wagon. ‘Leave everything in the car!’ The guards storm up and down bellowing their orders. Leave everything? But they have so little. They leave (thankfully or reluctantly) the corpses of the already dead. They clamber or jump down, or are hauled out like carcasses from a butcher’s van. Glaring lights blind them. Screams tell them that they have been transported to purgatory. Dogs snarl and snatch at those on the periphery. If they did not know before, that heaven and hell exist in this world and not the next, they realise it now. In ranks of five they shuffle toward the doctor whose limp-wristed gesture indicates left or right – life on the never-never or bargain basement death. Who are the lucky ones? Those who go almost at once to the shower? Perhaps. The welcoming ensemble plays light music from the Viennese operettas. The bow of the violinist (who caught an earlier train) does not falter on the strings. The violin sweetly sings. Music reveals its unforeseen capacity for hypocrisy, dishonesty, and deceit. Music, we discover, is the food of more than love. (Yes, and once the Jews had been sent on their way, nearly half of the musicians in the Vienna Philharmonic were members of the Nazi Party!)

There was no love lost between the Germans and the inhabitants of Oradour-sur-Glane. Afterward an SS commander said they had punished the wrong village. In a sense it made no difference – except of course to the individuals concerned. Even the church bells melted.

If the Nazis were the bad guys, who were the good guys?

Good guys were few and far between.

‘It may be several weeks or even months before I shall ask you to drench Germany with poison gas, and if we do it, let us do it one hundred per cent.’

Who said that?

Winnie.

Little Winnie-the-pooh bear?

No.

Jolly Winnie Atwell, the popular pianist?

No.

Who, then?

Big Winnie Churchill, the maudlin, irritable, irrational, aggressive, egocentric narcissist who fuelled himself with alcohol and speed, and whose stupidity and callousness over half a century sent hundreds of thousands of young men to needless death.

Give him the Order of The Bloody Garter!

Yes, and when Winston (who looked like a British bulldog (its back end even more than its front)) was told about the Bengal famine in which more than three million starved to death, his only response was to regret that Ghandi wasn’t one of them. (And when a book about the famine by Indian artist, Chittaprosad, was published, the Brits seized the entire print run and destroyed it.)

As well as a Czech mate, Winnie had a French mate: Charles de Gaulle – who had an ego bigger than his prodigious nose. As soon as British and American forces had driven the Germans out of Normandy, and the Nazis had relinquished the French capital, Charlie insisted that a French division should be the first to enter Paris. The Brits and Yanks, concerned presumably about the photographic record, would only agree as long as the French force included no black soldiers. This proved to be a problem as sixty-five per cent of all French divisions were made up of colonial troops, mainly from West Africa. So Allied Command insisted that Blacks be taken out of the ‘conquering’ division and replaced by Whites from other units. When it became clear that there were too few white French soldiers to fill the gaps, soldiers from Spain, and men from parts of North Africa and the Middle East who looked white-ish, were used instead.

This did not deter de Gaulle from making a fine speech in which the onion seller brought tears to sentimental Froggy eyes by declaiming, ‘Paris stood up to liberate itself and succeeded in doing this with its own hands. Paris! Paris outraged! Paris broken! Paris martyred! But Paris liberated! Liberated by itself, liberated by its people with the help of the French armies, with the support and the help of all France, of the France that fights, of the only France, of the real France, of the eternal France!’

(There was no mention of old man Pétain or the countless collaborators.)

If you’re small and weak, under the heel of the strong and powerful, you can either submit, or fight. If you have no hope, and you submit, you suffer. If you keep hope alive, and you fight, you suffer. Clever oppressors always ensure that the suffering of those who submit is less than the suffering of those who fight. In Southeast Asia before the Second World War, the French (the real French, the eternal French, or as the Indochinese would say, the infernal French) were greedy, but not clever. They had a penchant for executions without trial, and displayed Vietnamese body parts in public places as a way of endearing themselves to the locals. They were midwives to the longest revolutionary struggle in modern history.

Then came the Japanese! Uncle Ho had returned from China to find his people dying like fish in a drying pond, scavenging for roots and wild pineapple. In northern Vietnam alone, two million out of a population of ten million had starved. Trees could not grow fast enough to provide wood for coffins. The dead, if they were lucky, were wrapped in a bamboo mat. So what had caused the famine? Had rice begun to grow downward instead of up? No. Rice was shipped to Japan (just like the bumper harvests of wheat that went to England during the famine in Ireland one hundred years earlier). Rice was burned as fuel in factories, or fed to the Imperial Army. And Vietnam’s rice fields were planted with seed oil, cotton, and jute for the Nipponese war effort. Ho despatched his messengers to every corner of the country (even though it was long and wiggly – that is to say, even though it didn’t have corners). This is the communication they carried: ‘If you are hungry, seize the rice stores now!’

They were.

They did.

When the Japs scarpered, and the French returned, Uncle Ho asked his mate, Vo Nguyen Giap (that name rings a bell), to take charge of the liberation forces. ‘Give me a rundown on our military might,’ said Uncle.

‘Thirty-four men, two revolvers, seventeen rifles, fourteen flintlocks and one light machine gun,’ he was told.

Then, just outside Saigon, a US secret service man was wounded – the first American casualty in Vietnam. And before his blood had dried, in a separate incident, his chief, Lieutenant Colonel Peter Dewey, was killed by machine-gun fire. One down – fifty-eight thousand and twenty-one to go. Ho Chi Minh was against killing Americans. He sent a letter of condolence.

Dewey’s death made President Roosevelt more determined than ever to give Indochina away (he was nothing if not generous). He had been trying to give the damn place away for years. In 1942 he had promised De Gaulle that France could have it back. In 1943 he said that France had milked Indochina for one hundred years and left its people worse off than they were before; he would give it to someone else. In 1944 he decided that he would give it to France after all. In 1945 he changed his mind again and offered it to China. Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek looked this gift horse in the mouth. Nay, he said. The Indochinese would not assimilate into the Chinese people. ‘Well then, who the hell can we give it to?’ Roosevelt asked himself.

Ho, meanwhile, was off-colour. Having been served a cocktail of tropical diseases by destiny, he was preparing for a plunge into the Lethe when a posse of US secret service men dropped in (by parachute). They found him to be little more than bones covered with dry, yellow skin. The team medic treated him, and saved his life.

Ho, ho, ho – real life is far richer in its little ironies than good literature dare ever be.

And here’s another little irony:

Dresden, where there was no war machine, no industry, and no air defences, was blasted and burned by the ‘good guys’ for no good reason. More than one hundred and thirty thousand of its citizens (women and infants and old timers) were transmogrified into low-grade charcoal.

Why?

Because they were there.

This mass murder went on while an American prisoner of war of German descent, who was to become one of the greatest novelists of the twentieth century, was safeguarded by his enemies in the sanctuary of the city’s slaughterhouse!

So it goes.

Well, now that Dresden has been reduced to ashes and soot, let’s nip down to Dachau.

Ooh, look! The SS officers are wearing driving gloves of the finest leather. And the wife of the chief scientist has a new handbag. ‘Wherever did you get such exquisite hide, darling?’ she asks her husband. ‘Skin from the thighs and buttocks of vermin who died during my experiments,’ he tells her.

Well, waste not, want not, as the old hausfrau used to say.

Now what’s this? A jolly old chuff-chuff left on the siding. Last train from Buchenwald. Are there carriages for passengers? No. Just fifty boxcars. What’s inside? Cows, maybe? Sheep? I hope not. It would be unkind to pack animals into those airless holds and leave them under the scorching sun. Let’s open a door and peek inside. That’s funny. It’s like looking into a sardine can… except… it’s full of kindling instead of fish. Look at those stacks of sticks. That’s how I used to draw people when I was small: stick people. Fifty boxcars, stacked with stick people.

There was no room at the inn in Dachau. The showers couldn’t cleanse folk fast enough. So the reception staff had no choice but to lock the boxcars, shunt them off onto a siding, and abandon them.

And what did the Japanese do?

They also loved trains. They wanted to build a railway line all the way across Thailand and Burma. Imagine the views. It would be a trip to die for!

And talking of dying, in Croatia, too, concentration camps were busy. The Ustaša (loved by the Catholic Church) murdered more than half a million Serbs as well as tens of thousands of Jews and Roma. Children even had their very own concentration camp.

Dear reader, I’m sorry. I would have liked to invite you to dance. How was I to know that the floor would be heaped with stiffs and sticky with blood?

And so, as the Second World War approached its end, we might wonder about its raison d’être. Could it be that Hitler had accepted, as a gift from the Gods, a wife whose dowry was a box containing every human misery? Could Adolph have been foolish enough to open the box? Armies of liberation found ample evidence to support this hypothesis in Auschwitz, Belsen, Buchenwald, Chelmo, Dachau, Sobibor, Treblinka, and sixty other smoky enterprise zones, with their stacked corpses as flat and yellow as lumber.

Americans were the first to discover some of this evidence. You’d assume then, knowing that all this bad karma was at large like a pandemic of locusts, they’d have been zealous in trying to stuff it back into the box so that they could get the lid screwed on. But you’d be wrong. On August 6th an American military aeroplane, flying nine thousand eight hundred and fifty-five metres above the Japanese city of Hiroshima, unclenched its anus and, while the city was still rubbing sleep from its eyes and scratching itself, dropped a Little Boy.

‘Long lines of people came walking, like ghosts, slowly, silently, through the black rain. They stretched out their arms, and their skin was peeling off and hanging from them like cobwebs. Their raw flesh was wet and red, and they smelled of burnt hair. Some asked for water, but when they drank, they vomited blood and died in front of me.’

The description is too appalling to contemplate.

Let us turn our attention to lesser things.

Dick (unarguably a lesser thing) having been a regularly ripped-apart package in a game of pass the parcel played by a line of forgettable foster parents, had mutated into a hot potato. Consequently, his ‘Home’ became a many-roomed Victorian mansion that had seen better days. However unbearable its atmosphere must once have been under the heavy, smothering, drab, velvet draperies of Victorian Podsnappery, it was certainly worse once it had degenerated into a lock-up for strays, orphans, and rejects.

Nobody told O’Toole about the cosmic event that had occurred in Hiroshima. If someone had, he might well have volunteered that there were a number of little boys he would be perfectly happy to see dumped from a great height out of an aeroplane. Boys of a bullying disposition were drawn to O’Toole like cats to a wounded bird. And there was no shortage of opportunity: the weekly bath, for example. The institution being understaffed, the bigger boys (who had experienced no tenderness themselves) were empowered to exorcise and exercise some of their demons by subjecting the little kids to near-drowning techniques and a callous cleansing with scrubbing brushes.

But what was O’Toole doing as Little Boy plunged toward that city, situated across the bay from the Island of Light, that was about to become an island of darkness? In the land of the rising sun, the sun had in fact already risen and was beaming down from the Emperor’s arsehole, but in once-great Britain it was still the witching hour. And O’Toole was having his face rubbed in his own excrement. This was the punishment that the witch deemed appropriate for little boys who did poos in the bed. O’Toole, being from his very early years of a self-pitying nature, imagined that what was being done to him must be just about the worst thing that one human being could do to another. Little did he know!

Three days later, the Americans shat on the Japanese again. A US Super-fortress relieved itself – and a Fat Man fell on Nagasaki. ‘Fat Man’ was so called because its ‘cheerful rotundity’ reminded some American moron of that sullen and heartless old bastard, Churchill. More’s the pity that they didn’t drop old Roly-poly himself out of the aeroplane instead of their jolly little bomb.

It should be remembered that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were only the last of sixty-seven Japanese cities destroyed from the air following the firebombing of Dresden. General ‘Bombs Away’ LeMay had commanded the destruction of the previous sixty-five, including Tokyo, with incendiary clusters, magnesium bombs, white phosphorus bombs, and napalm, thus cooking, grilling, charring, baking, boiling, broiling, braising, frizzling, frying, melting, scalding, scorching, searing, singeing, sizzling, smoking, steaming, stewing, poaching, toasting, roasting and otherwise enflaming to death five hundred thousand civilians. As the young Japanese males were away behaving atrociously, ‘civilians’ meant littlies, ladies, and oldies.

Smoke gets in your eyes.

In the toilet one day, Dick came upon two of the bigger boys sharing a cigarette. Where they had got it from, or how it had been smuggled in, Dick couldn’t imagine. In any case there was no time for imagining. Dick had not the slightest intention of dobbing them in – they could hide their butts up their butts for all he cared. Nevertheless he was subjected to a bashing and torturing session to try to make him say that he wouldn’t tell – and he wouldn’t say it.

He was a strange child.

He was stubborn, though not courageous like plucky Oliver Twist who asked for more (not that Dick had ever heard of Oliver Twist, of course). The boys were always hungry, but neither Dick nor any other boy was ever brave enough to ask for more. Perhaps this was because their swill was so unpalatable that having to eat their small portion of it was punishment enough.

But let us be positive. The Second World War did end (with a couple of bangs in Japan and countless whimpers in Europe): its demise was a great relief to all concerned – except for the profiteers. Uncle Ho, accompanied by his American military advisors (honest!), marched into Hanoi. American warplanes saluted the newly liberated city. US officers stood on the reviewing stand alongside General Giap. (Giap – him again?) A Vietnamese band played The Star-Spangled Banner. Hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese people thronged the city’s now-Vietnamese boulevards and squares. Manual labourers and managers, peasants and priests, monks and military personnel, landlords and layabouts, merchants and mandarins, tiny tots and the tottering toothless rubbed shoulders and swapped smiles. Lanterns, flowers, banners, and flags blossomed on every side. The atmosphere was as intoxicating as Carnival in Rio, although entertainments were considerably less colourful, and entertainers more modestly clad. A horde of Party hacks and ardent revolutionaries declaimed speeches weighed down with jargon and over-decorated with clichés. They sang the praises of the heroes and martyrs – though sadly the martyrs were unable to join in the festivities. But Ho’s speech was the best. He read out the Declaration of Independence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. He said: ‘All men are created equal. They are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights. Among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.’ Well, as everyone knows, that’s what the Americans believed too. Obviously the United States and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam were going to get along like a house on fire. But the Yanks had napalm and the zippo lighter, and they made damn sure that it was the Vietnamese house that would burn.

But before that, there was the French connection.

The French, of course, wanted to go back to the good old days when they were able to swindle, bully, rape, and murder Vietnamese people to their heart’s content. The British – mass swindlers, bullies, rapists, and murderers themselves – were sympathetic. General Gracey, who was sent to Saigon to disarm the Japanese, violated his orders by releasing and arming interned French troops, who showed their appreciation by going on a rampage through the city. British and Brit-controlled Indian troops, together with the French and Japanese (all one big happy family now that the war was over) then collaborated to re-impose French power in Saigon.

‘We’ve done all we can for you, old chap,’ said General Gracey, graciously, resplendent in his proud British uniform, patting Admiral Georges Thierry d’Argenlieu on the head. (He called him ‘old chap’ because he couldn’t pronounce his name.) ‘We’ve put you back on your jolly old Frog’s legs. Now you’d better hop to it.’

‘Half a croissant is better than none,’ said D’Argenlieu to Ho. ‘You can keep the north. We’ll have the south.’ But white men speak with forked tongue. Before the year was out, the French moved north, bombarded Haiphong, killing six thousand residents, and invaded the ruins. Ho cabled an appeal asking them to honour the accord that they had signed. This was General Valluy’s response: ‘If those gooks want a fight, they’ll get it.’

Viet Minh declared war on the French in Vietnam and took to the hills. Ho said, ‘Those who have rifles will use their rifles. Those who have swords will use their swords. Those who have no swords will use their spades, hoes, and sticks.’ Ho also had a warning for his people – and a promise: ‘If ever the tiger pauses,’ he said, ‘the elephant will impale him on his mighty tusks. But the tiger will not pause, and the elephant will die of exhaustion and loss of blood.’ If only France, not to mention the United States, had ears to hear!

The clanking armour of the French got bogged down in the paddies and tangled up in the forests. Viet Minh moved, fleet of foot and silent, through his own terrain in cheap tennis shoes and sandals made from the enemy’s discarded tyres. When the French failed to find the Viet Minh fighters, they took out their frustration on the poor of Vietnam. They razed villages, and took away the menfolk strung together in long lines with the barbed wire of despotism pushed (in the Christian fashion) through the palms of the prisoners’ hands. In Paris they began to call it, ‘La Sale Guerre’ – ‘The Dirty War’. By comparison, it seems, the Nazis fought clean.

In Palestine, the Stern Gang was indulging in its own dirty war. Its members were fundamentalist Zionists, admirers, strangely, of Mussolini and the Italian Blackshirts, fanatically intent on nothing less than the restoration of a biblical Israel. They exploded powerful truck bombs in Haifa, Tel Aviv, and then Jaffa, causing dozens of deaths, and serious injuries in the hundreds. The Jaffa truck was parked next to a soup kitchen for poor kids. None of the mangled children asked for more.

Palestinian leaders were so impressed by the success of these operations that they immediately adopted the tactic themselves.

More blood on the streets. More carnage. More misery. Another step up the Jacob’s Ladder of escalation.

Meanwhile, the Americans, the world’s eternal children, continued to play with their nuclear toys.

They created a mind-blowing light show and history’s most spectacular fountain by detonating a twenty-three-kiloton bomb in the lagoon of Bikini Atoll, dropping their load from a B-29 aeroplane. An audience of servicemen and scientists looked on and cheered. Closer to the epicentre an unmanned ark was bobbing around, carrying four thousand animals. The Yanks wanted to see how the critters liked that. They didn’t like it at all. Islanders gave a rendition of ‘Some Enchanted Evening’, and shook their butts in grass skirts. ‘I’m gonna wash that fallout outta my hair,’ they sang.

Fat chance.

While all this was going on, the major part of Dick’s infant day was squandered in the schoolroom under the sniper eyes of Miss Rule. When the boys, who sat on long benches, were not writing with their white chalk, their defenceless hands must lie prone on the grey slate, at the mercy of a black yardstick.

‘Seven times seven?’ She aims the weapon at the runt.

Seven times seven? Dick lowers his eyes. His slate is as cold and bare as a waste tip on a Welsh winter mountain. No answer there.

‘O’Toole! Look at me, boy, when I speak to you!’

Her method bore no fruit of course. At five years old, O’Toole didn’t have a clue. While others chanted their tables, or the alphabet, or the Lord’s Prayer, or the days of the week backward in French, O’Toole silently opened and closed his mouth like a beached blobfish. (Blobfish, believe me, are the most miserable-looking fish on the planet.) Dick was determined not to cooperate, and instead, thought obsessively about escape. To where, to what, he did not know.

The aforementioned yardstick was ebony, heavy and flat, but with no measurements marked upon it. Perhaps it had been made for the specific purpose of beating little boys. In any case, Miss Rule failed to get O’Toole’s measure.

I (your author), had a donkey once (rescued from the knacker’s yard), and if it didn’t want to move, you couldn’t make it move. You could shout at it, punch it, whack it with a stick, but it wouldn’t budge; and if you became too aggressive, it would swing its haunches around and try to kick you into intensive care. I had a soft spot for that bad-tempered old bugger. ‘Move, you dozy old shithouse,’ I’d yell, ‘or I’ll cut off your bloody legs!’ and at the same time I’d be gazing into the glowering great pools of its black bellicose eyes, thinking, ‘Good for you, brother. Don’t let the bastards push you around!’

O’Toole was a donkey. Miss Rule treated him like a dog.

We interrupt this narrative to bring you some breaking news. Finally Mother France has bowed to reality and recognised the Communist Democratic Republic of Vietnam and its democratically elected president, Ho Chi Minh.

C’est formidable. Peace at last.

Miss Rule’s superior, the commander of the little vessel O’Toole had been press-ganged onto, was another leathery old virago. What shall we call her? Miss Chief? Miss Judge? Miss Carriage? No, she should have been a miscarriage, but she wasn’t. Well, let it be Miss Born. Miss Rule was a cross between Maggie Thatcher and one of those (dubiously) female East European shot-put champions. Miss Born was similar, though larger, and less feminine. And what better job for those two shrewd old shrews – who probably had good reason to be hostile to men – than running a closed and secretive institution in which they could tear the wings off little boys.

Some little boys were, of course, a trial. Dick, for example, was not only less educable than a Frizzle Bantam, and less manageable than a wounded wildcat, but he peed in his pants every day and pissed in his bed every night. He had not yet learned that this was not the way to win friends and influence people.

Excuse me: another news flash. The colonial French are ignoring instructions from Paris. They are attacking the Vietnamese.

Bloody hell!

(It will come to that.)

But back to the ammonia fumes of Dick’s depravity. Here he is, being dragged from his stinking and steaming sleeping pit by an officer of the dark. He is slapped about the head (the only part of him not polluted with piss). A hand grasps his hair, and his face is ground into his disgrace. ‘Why they brought you over here I’ll never know. You’re the most insolent, most stupid, most disagreeable creature I’ve ever had the misfortune to set eyes upon. You should be sent back to where you came from.’

Brought here? Sent back? Was he a Martian? Dick’s brain reels and staggers like Brendan Behan on a bad day. But no, not a Martian, it turns out: merely ‘a stinking little Irish pig.’

He hauls the heavy sheets from the bed, like a trawlerman heaving in nets clogged with seaweed, and drags them as best he can to the cellar where he puts them to soak, along with his pyjamas, in a deep sink. Half asleep, bruised and exhausted, he stumbles upstairs to the dormitory for further punishment, after which he collapses, uncovered and goose-fleshed, onto the fouled, fetid mattress of his misfortune, and fades into and out of a shivery slumber.

And now for some really bad news.

Item 1: More and more people are becoming addicted to a new drug. Is it LSD? Well, that’s become available, too. But no – more frightening, more far-reaching, more mind-numbing than that: it’s called TV.

Item 2: In the UK, post-war austerity results in increased rationing (enabling the black market to flourish).

Item 3: Still in the UK, a start is being made on the construction of the first atomic power stations.

Item 4: In South Africa, Prime Minister Smuts announces a universal truth. ‘Race equality does not work.’ Good old Smutty.

Item 5: In India, Moslems want a separate state from Hindus. Dogs feed upon corpses in city streets. In bamboo thickets vultures take their pick. There is blood on the tracks. Four hundred thousand slaughtered! Here comes independence: tick-tock, stab-slash, splish-splash. Colonialism has received a blade to the heart, and like a bad Shakespearian actor (but unlike train travellers), is taking a long time to die.

Item 6: The Greeks are at loggerheads amongst themselves.

Item 7: And so are the Chinese.

Item 8: The UN is born. (Is that bad news? Well, as the Mexican delegate to the founding convention points out, the UN Charter assures that ‘the mice will be disciplined, but the lions will be free.’)

Item 9: I’ve saved the worst till last. Maggie Roberts becomes head of the Oxford University Conservatives! Oh, dear. This is going to end in tears!

And there are tears in Palestine.

The King David Hotel, headquarters of the British Army Command, is blown up, killing ninety-four and injuring fifty-three. There is a spree of shootings, stabbings, bombings, kidnappings, and hangings. The list of victims’ names reaches all the way to Rome – where the British Embassy is wrecked by a bomb.

And who are the terrorists responsible for these atrocities?

Palestinians?

No. Jews, that’s who. Zionists. The Irgun group, and the Stern Gang. The Jews want a homeland, and why wouldn’t they? And they want it in Palestine – which is tough on the Palestinians who live there. Tough on the Limeys, too, who are over there doing the policing.

Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll tell you a story.

An Arab had a house, with a garage, and a nice garden with olives and oranges, and a garden shed.

Along came a Jew. He said, ‘Where I come from, the neighbours were giving me hell. I need a new place to live.’

‘Okay,’ said the Arab. ‘You can move into my garage.’

‘No, no,’ said the Jew. ‘A lot of my friends and relations will be coming to join me. I’ll have the house. You can move into the garage.’

‘That’s not fair,’ said the Arab. He called in a passing Brit.

The Brit said, ‘You must share the house and garden – half each.’

‘You mind your own business,’ said the Jew. And with that he set about the Brit. Pow! Whack! Smack! Kerboom!

‘Stuff this,’ said the Brit, badly bruised. ‘I’m going home.’

‘In fact,’ said the Jew to the Arab, ‘I’m going to need the house and the garage. And the garden, too.’

‘What! No way!’ said the Arab. ‘Over my dead body!’

‘If that’s what you want,’ said the Jew, and set about the Arab. Smash! Biff! Bang! Kapow! And he kicked the Arab all the way to the shed at the bottom of the garden.

The Jew’s friends and relations arrived. ‘Nice house you got here,’ they said. ‘Nice garden. Pity about the Arab in the shed.’

Outside Dick’s place of confinement there is no garden. There is nothing that grows or flowers. Nothing that exhales life. Just a square of grey-black asphalt, that grazes him when he falls or is knocked down. The yard is enclosed by an unscaleable wall, high enough to keep the captives in and the world’s eyes out. Only once are the inmates taken outside the wall. They march in a crocodile, a screw leading the way, another bringing up the rear, through a damp and gritty haze, past sorry bombsites, and a huddle of prefabs. A bus stops a little way ahead. A double-decker bus. Passengers enter and leave via an open platform at the rear nearside. There is a central vertical pole on the platform by way of a handgrip. The conductor rings the bell. The bus begins to move. On impulse, Dick decides to flee. (I have never suggested that Dick was the sharpest O’Toole in the shed.) He does not think about where the bus might be going, or how he might survive when he gets there. He breaks ranks. He runs. The bus accelerates. Deaf to the cries of his jailers, Dick grabs the pole – but he has never learned to pole dance. The bus is now travelling too fast. Dick is yanked off his feet. Determined not to let go, he is dragged along the road like a sack behind a tractor (a sad sack). Skin is left behind on tarmac. Passengers shout. The conductor rings an emergency bell. The bus jerks to a halt. Dick’s physical pain is masked by his despair. He is hauled to his feet, and frog-marched, torn and bleeding, back to prison. He is beaten for disgracing the institution in public. Because of him, his fellow inmates fail to reach their destination. Dick has always been disliked. Now he is detested. But worse than the stripped flesh and bruised buttocks and peer contempt, is the excremental taste of failure.

On the other side of the back yard’s unassailable wall, in that unknown world that Dick was so eager to escape to, those good, pacific people of the Marshall Islands had a visitor. It was none other than their new owner, Uncle Sam (he had bought the islands and the islanders in a job lot off the Japanese), disguised as a fairy godfather. He promised to protect their lands, their resources, and their health. He told them that he had a genie in a bottle, and that he was going to release it and harness it for their good. What he meant was that, tickled pink by his pyrotechnics down there the previous year, he was planning to explode sixty more nuclear bombs in their Paradise. But you have to understand that savages are like gentle, trusting but ignorant children. That’s why Uncle had to explain it to them like that.

Dick (ignorant all right, though certainly not trusting) had a visitor too. It was the first visit O’Toole had received since he fell into the clutches of those two old harpies, Miss Rule (who was becoming more muscular by the minute) and Miss Born (whose many moles continued to sprout hairs like bamboo shoots in the jungle after a monsoon). And who was this visitor? It was none other than the return of the mummy! (Not that Dick recognised her.) And the mummy had an appendage, which was called Phil.

The mummy presented Dick with a toy car on a string. Dick was gobsmacked (which made a change from having his gob smacked). The car was a police car. Dick hadn’t yet learned about the characteristics of police persons, so he had no objection to that. He clutched the tin car in a rigid claw and stared at the ground. The mummy and the Phil tried to make small talk (which seemed appropriate given that Dick was undeniably small), but it was an unrewarded effort. Dick was a clam.

It being a Saturday afternoon, the boys were allowed into the exercise yard. After his vacuous visitors had evaporated, Dick ran around and around the yard of his sudden exhilaration pulling his tin car behind him by its string.

Until it was gleefully stomped upon by fellow inmates.

In this Dotheboys Hall, toys were not allowed. Dick stowed his priceless car wreck among his uniform in the small locker beside his iron cot. If the wooden locker can stand as a symbol for Dick, the wreck inside it was his heart.

Then came the dormitory police, and Dick’s heart was torn out.

Dick reacted with the animation of a stone.

And from under a stone, eight thousand kilometres away, down below the Hollywood sign, something comes crawling. Why, it’s Ronald Rattlesnake Reagan (not yet totally senile), with a bunch of venomous conservative cronies, about to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities that communists are worming their way into the American Dream.

Joseph McCarthy has reclaimed from the witchcraft museum the pillory, the stocks, and the ducking stool. In his interrogation chamber, Americans who are intelligent and concerned will be persecuted for being intelligent and concerned.

And that’s not all. The US Government has given birth to a monster called CIA that will quickly grow into an iniquitous, unethical, and vicious delinquent. The behemoth is created in order to carry out covert operations involving propaganda, sabotage, economic warfare, rigged elections, and merciless assassinations. Malfeasance without borders.

The Cold War begins to bite.

The Cold War – what’s that all about? Let’s ask the Sage of Baltimore.

‘The aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.’

Thank you, Mr Mencken.

In Deir Yassin, where there is no scarcity of real hobgoblins, the Palestinians sign a non-belligerency pact with their new Jewish neighbours. ‘Live and let live,’ they say. They are surrounded by desert. And the desert is littered with stones. And from beneath these stones, crawlies (worse even than their Californian cousins) come creeping – stealthily skulking under the cover of darkness and the Zionist Intelligence Service. Ach, so! It’s Menachem Begin and his terrorist outfit, the Irgun. Soon, two hundred and fifty Palestinian villagers, male and female, adults and children, lie dying. Their blood soaks into the dirt helping the Jews make the desert flower.

They stop counting the Arab dead. Seven hundred thousand are driven off their land and out of their homes. Seven hundred thousand Palestinian refugees with nowhere to go.

Palestine?

They call it Israel now.

US government medical researchers meanwhile were interested in sexually transmitted diseases, and so they intentionally infected one thousand three hundred guinea pigs with gonorrhoea, syphilis, or chancroid. The guinea pigs were human. Oh, yes, and they were Guatemalan. The males were prison inmates and the females were mental hospital patients. Obviously you can’t explain to people like that the importance of medical research, and so they remained uninformed. But not wanting to deprive them of having fun, they were encouraged to pass the infection onto others. Sadly, the experiment failed to provide any useful information.

Ah, well, you can’t win ’em all.

Uncle Sam had been misbehaving in Europe, too. His fear of communism gave him the collywobbles, and that was his diabolical excuse for recruiting known war criminals to organise ‘Stay Behind Armies’ that would lead the resistance against the Soviet invasion (if it came), and that would destabilise left-wing democratic movements that might become popular. Hundreds of Nazis and Fascists were shielded from prosecution and paid well by the US Counter Intelligence Corps, and secret arms dumps were established all over Western Europe. One of America’s favourite mass murderers, little Klaus Barbie, the Butcher of Lyon, perpetrator of heinous crimes while head of Gestapo torture chambers, was kept in luxury as payment for his good works. But when the French got a sniff of his whereabouts, the Yanks whisked him away to South America using one of the Vatican-run ratlines.

The world knows that you can’t trust the Yanks. Uncle Ho, though, understood the importance of trust. He told his soldiers that local customs must be honoured; that the people were to be helped in their daily work; that nothing was to be done that would damage their property; that folk must not be forced to part with their goods; that the masses were to be respected. He knew that victory was built with the people as its foundation. He knew that his army was the fish, and that the people was the water.

And the French? What did the French know?

The French, like the Americans, knew fuck all.

But back in the grim, grey, austerity of post-war England (where despite everything, the Labour Government was sowing seeds of civilisation), Dick was sprung. Wow. So is this then a story with a happy ending: an unwanted bastard plucked from an oubliette and launched into the life of Reilly?

We shall see.

And who was the fairy godmother that released him from his incarceration?

It was none other than the mummy.

But why? Clearly the mummy didn’t like Dick. Nor did Dick like the mummy. As far as he was concerned it was out of the frying pan and into the fire. You can just imagine him, can’t you, a little, withered, grey mushroom of a child, shrivelling in the scalding fat, thinking, ‘If only I could get out of here,’ and then, magically, with a whip of a spatula, he’s in the air, his prayers have been answered, and then…

Let us give the mummy a name. We shall call her Flo (– not that young Dick could imagine she was the Flo anyone would want to go with). I would have named her after Mrs Joe who brought up Pip by hand, given the uncanny likeness between the two – but if my memory serves me well, Mrs Joe doesn’t merit a name of her own.

Flo stomped into the Boys’ Home, like Hitler into Czechoslovakia, and demanded her rights. Dick was readily handed over, and the staff and inmates of the institution were more than happy to see the pee-stained back of him.

Flo’s bed-sitting room was a ground floor cell in a small terraced house close to the market. You could smell the market, especially on market days, and you could hear the poor beasts crying miserably or fearfully as they waited, like Dick, to see what would happen next. There was a bed for Flo, where she sometimes entertained. Some sort of sleeping arrangement was made up for Dick – but he kept peeing in it. There was no kitchen or bathroom or hot water. Little wonder, then, that Flo was soon at the end of her tether – where she remained for the next ten years. The end of your tether is the place where you have continual, uncontrollable, violent outbursts – the place where you beat pee-smelling little boys with the implement nearest at hand until you are too exhausted to continue.

But, magic happens. Flo presented Dick with a kitten someone had foisted upon her. It was black. Dick, being a child devoid of imagination, called it… wait for it:

Blackie.

Flo now had two dependents pissing all over the place.

Upon Blackie, Dick bestowed his love. This love was probably not reciprocated. But Dick did not mind the tearing claws and the sharp little teeth. He was used to being hurt. He was used to being shat on. There was nothing Blackie could do that would lessen his devotion.

Meanwhile, there was school: a place of mutual loathing between Dick and the institution and its personnel – another location of daily punishment, rejection, pain, and humiliation. Soon after his admittance there was to be a sports day. Was Dick good at running? He didn’t know. (He hadn’t been able to run fast enough to catch the bus!) They would give him a trial to see whether he would be picked to perform on the day. Dick had to line up with the boys who had been selected for the sprint, and when a teacher cried, ‘Ready, steady, go!’ they were to dash across the playground. When Dick realised that he was falling behind the others he threw himself face first onto the asphalt. How pathetic was that! The grown-up Dick would often recall the incident with shame. It was a recollection he would gladly have erased, but some memories, like lonely and boring people, keep turning up and won’t leave you in peace.

When the releasing bell was rung, and school was out, Dick would hurry home to his one and only friend. But one day, Blackie was nowhere to be found. There was not much of a room to